This article has been written in response to this advice column article.
Dear Delaney and Saber Slate staff,
The staff of The Saber Roar wants to thank you for some of your suggestions. We were looking to the students for ideas as to what they want to see covered and you gave us a few good leads. However, we also felt we needed to address a few misconceptions you may have about The Saber Roar and why it is played during the advisory block.
Why is it played during the advisory block?
The gold block time on Monday is called the advisory block. It is a purposeful time together when all students are required to stay with their gold block teacher. Teachers confer with students around academic needs, but also to get to know the student and build a supportive community among all the gold block students. Most students will be with that teacher for four years, so they really get to know each other. This is also a time to build a cohesive FHS community, and one of the ways we do this is by taking the time to share ten minutes watching The Saber Roar, where we see the great things students and staff are doing at FHS.
What is the Saber Roar? A class or club?
The Saber Roar is a class. It is not a club. What you see on The Saber Roar is our classwork. We are learning in front of our audience. Not everything we do will be perfect. Imagine listening to presentations in English class. Are all the presenters perfectly polished? Do they reach the depth of content needed? Or is there a variety? We have on average about 3.5 hours of class time per week to produce a 7 to 12-minute show. Since it is a class, we believe that everyone deserves an opportunity to try all the jobs, including hosts. We always work to become better. Mrs. Hepworth has helped our on-camera hosts work on being more comfortable and this comes with time. When you wrote your suggestions, we had only produced 3 shows out of the 24 we do in a year.
Who gets to be on The Saber Roar?
To get into the Video Production Company class (TSR) we have taken two years of video production classes, Intro to Video and Advanced Video. We then have to go through a job interview to be accepted in the TSR class. It is organized as a student-run production company. There are coordinating producers that run the overall production and show producers responsible for individual shows as well as mentoring the first-year TSR students.
What is the purpose of The Saber Roar?
We try to help build a stronger FHS community and we take that responsibility seriously.
We cover events around the school so students can be recognized for their hard work and take time to celebrate accomplishments. Over the years we’ve covered conference champions, state qualifiers, musical performances, important fundraisers such as Relay for Life, March Madness, and more. We also try to advertise upcoming events and special projects.
We also use the time to educate students on people in our community and give all groups a voice. We’ve done segments on Ramdan, the history of African American hair, March for Our Lives, Hispanic history, LGBTQ history, Native American Day of Mourning, Saber Spotlight and many more. TSR started the Kindness Movement to create a more inclusive school. We ran the National P-Wats day to recognize our amazing security aide. We’ve surprised teachers for teacher appreciation week. We hope these moments give students a glimpse into someone else’s life, bring understanding and empathy for all.
We also try to entertain and involve students. We have done comedy sketches with students and teachers. These are some of our most popular segments, but they are also the hardest to do well. We’ve surprised students in class with giant cookies, played games like the hidden saber, given away tee shirts, and involved gold blocks in challenges and Gold Block Games; all in hopes of building a stronger, kinder, and more spirited community.
We grow as filmmakers and change agents. We enter our work into many film festivals locally, nationally and internationally. We invite filmmakers, documentarians, cinematographers and more into our classroom. We travel to films, events, and Los Angeles to grow and learn as a team and as people.
So we hope you find some value in the things we do. We appreciate your suggestions and more leads are always appreciated.
Ms. DeClark, Ben the Diabetic, and the students of The Saber Roar